Re: ROCHESTER PUSHES BACK 2000 ANNOUNCE DATE

Well, here's another spin:

Since Microsoft is doing the grand Win 2000 rollout bash in Feburary, do you
suppose ANYTHING Rochester announced near the same date would get any attention
anyway given the LOW key approach by IBM to AS/400 announcements in the past?
I.e. NO big push in the media when 64-bit hardware/OS came out. NO big push when
Gartner Group said AS/400 had the highest single system availability in the
industry. NO big push when it now appears AS/400 is the fastest, most stable 
Java
server on the planet (if you believe IBM's benchmarks anyway).

What we seem to have at IBM is the IT equivalent of cultural relativism. In 
other
words, every machine/OS combination is equal in capability when we know quite
clearly they are not. Of course, our Global Services subsidiary will be happy to
hook you into a contract to keep your Unix or Win NT "solution" stable and
running into perpetuity while your AS/400 will most likely not generate much
follow on revenue for us. (This is NOT to say that Unix or Win NT is the wrong
answer in many cases, only to say that AS/400 rarely seems to be the winning
solution when IBM wants to lock in years of predictable services revenue even if
the profit margin is lower than hardware/software sales. I guess that's the way
Lou will keep his stock options worth something in the future.)

Pardon the bitterness, please. I just get very peeved when a company with some 
of
the best technology in the world isn't trumpeting it to anyone who'll even
pretend to listen. (Unlike a certain company that will ceaselessly promote
generally inferior technology as if it's the latest thing in computer science
even if the "solution" was one IBM already invented twenty years ago.)

Randy Mangham
Pacific Crest Consulting



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